YouTube Finally Ditches the 301+ View Count

YouTube has announced that it's doing away with the dastardly practice of assigning the "301+" view count on popular new videos.

As YouTube explains in the above image, the 301+ placeholder count was instituted with good intentions. When a popular video was acquiring views at a rapid rate, YouTube paused everything at 301 while it investigated the source of the views.

Basically, YouTube froze the counts until it could confirm the views were real, and not coming from bots. Not including spam bot views in the view count is important.

But 301+ sure is annoying.

Was annoying. YouTube says those days are over.

"Now, we count views we're confident came from real people as they're recorded, and keep reviewing the rest."

So view counts will now be up-to-date at all times – mostly. YouTube will review views of which the destination is unclear, and ass them later if they;re found to be legit.